Back Up Your Data!
It was a bit frightening.

A few months ago we added a Maxtor OneTouch 200G external hard drive to our system, which excited me greatly because it made backing up my files much easier. Then one day last week we heard a sudden "pop!" and...nothing. No recognition of the drive by the computer, no light on the drive, no light on the power supply. The last was actually good news, as it gave us hope that it was the power supply that had given out, rather than the drive itself with all our data.

Our first attempt to determine the full extent of the damage was frustrating. I called CompUSA (from which we had purchased the drive) and was told (1) yes, they did carry replacement power supplies for our Maxtor drive; (2) they were in stock; and (3) the cost would be $9.99. I thought that was very reasonable, and we headed out to the store.

Only to be met with incredulity: No, we don't have such a thing; we don't sell them and never have. But I just called and was told, etc., etc. Sorry, even though you called our local number, you were actually speaking with a call center and they were just plain wrong.

To the credit of the CompUSA manager, he did offer to sell us a device he thought would be compatible for the quoted $9.99, instead of the marked price, which was twice that. To take advantage of his offer would have been a mistake, however; we were spared thanks to reading the fine print and knowing 1 amp = 1000 milliamps (i.e. 300 ma is not the same as 3a.).

Maxtor itself was much more helpful. To our pleasant surprise, the drive was still under warranty, and they immediately sent us a new ($30) power supply. (Actually, I'm grateful to CompUSA, since if we'd been able to purchase the power supply that night we wouldn't have thought to check the warranty!) The package arrived today, and thanks be to God the drive itself was fine, and all our data with it.

We're up and running again, and struggling with the moral of the story: Back up your data, but quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How to back up the backup? If it's data you really don't want to lose, better have redundant backups, preferably not all in the same room, house, or city.

Posted by sursumcorda on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 2:40 pm | Edit
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Comments
I had been talking about this with someone recently, and we thought that perhaps there is a business for internet backups, but it turns out because all the web hosts who claim to give you 20 Gigs of disk space for $1/month or whatever they say, there isn't any way to compete with that. Once I get a second server, which will most likely have a terabyte or so of disk space, I might have a chance of offering that service for money that people would be willing to pay. Right now, I would probably have to charge $100/month for 50 gigs or so, and that makes it too expensive for people to not just buy an external hard drive.

Posted by jondaley on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 4:03 pm
A terabyte. It boggles the mind. Then again, I've already used up over 10G of our new computer's 250G drive, and I'm not nearly finished setting it up. Our old computer originally came with only a 10G drive, and I thought that was huge at the time.

You're right; it would be hard to pay $100/month for backup when external drives run about $1/gig. But of course those drives need to be reliable!

Posted by SursumCorda on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 4:20 pm
I suppose this is becoming an advertisement, but... The remote solution is better in the sense that the hard drives are redundant, so even if one does die, (which you have to expect occasionally, seems to be more often than used to happen) it doesn't affect the operation of the disks. Yes, a terabyte is kind of crazy, I agree.

Posted by jondaley on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 12:14 pm
I've found that e-mailing my data to myself solves the data storage problem.

Posted by Tom Dennen on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Interesting idea. Do you have something like a gmail account with lots of storage?

Posted by SursumCorda on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Gmail is cool. td gives me 2 gigs td2 another 2. And so on. Help yourself. The lord helps those who do, I'm told. Tom

Posted by Tom Dennen on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 4:02 pm
You could always set-up a RAID server. :-) I am glad to hear you did not have to try the freezer trick with your data.

Posted by David July on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Okay, I'll bite: freezer trick?

Posted by SursumCorda on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Stories like this are not all that uncommon, though I haven't ever tried it myself. http://www.meetmyattorney.com

Posted by jondaley on Saturday, February 04, 2006 at 3:21 pm
I tried it once and was able to get the drive running again for about an hour; just long enough to copy off some files and conduct a secure erasure of sensitive data.

Posted by David July on Sunday, February 05, 2006 at 8:18 pm
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